NYC's infamous, longest running FREE knitting class and social circle

Across the globe, woman and girls are isolated during their menstrual cycle. Because of a lack of funds to buy disposable feminine products, these young women are barred from school and work every month. This affects their ability to support their families and to persue an education with their male peers.

Days for Girls is a non profit organization that makes and distributes washable sanitary pad kits to women in these communities. One kit can improve a girl’s life immensely and will only take an afternoon of your time.

Please join Booze & Yarn & Otto’s Shrunken Head, and sponsored by Bust Magazine on Sunday, August 14th, to lend a hand to help women in impoverished communities get on with their lives. We will be cutting and assembling kits and all skill levels are welcome.

There will be 3 sewing machines available and we will be using this as an opportunity to also teach basic sewing techniques, while constructing the kits.

Stop on by to help the cause and have a cocktail or three…Bloody Maries of course!

The 3rd annual “First Craft of Spring”

On March 20th, 2011 Booze & Yarn, will be joined by artists all over the country for the 3rd annual First Craft of Spring. The sole purpose of the project is to promote public art and community initiative. Change is possible and even a bleak landscape can be transformed overnight by individuals. Be a part, take a walk to see the blooms, perhaps even pick one by your favorite artist…but most importantly, enjoy and embrace the first day of spring!

The project has been a great success the last 2 years, with artists across the country creating unique and beautiful flowers. Please join us!

I first met Stacy at Booze & Yarn a few years back. She inspired me and cracked me up the minute we met, and we quickly become good friends. She has a huge heart and this winter she came up with a humble little project that proves that yet again, and I just love it. I hope this project inspires you to follow in her foot steps. I know I’ll be stockpiling knitted hats for next winter to do just that.

I pinned Stacy down to ask her about the project recently via email (as she is on a beach outside of Oaxaca, Mexico) and here was her response:

In February 2010, having just turned in my first book, I was rightfully exhausted. I’d spent the winter months hunched over my desk in my tiny NYC studio apartment, slogging through the final edit, and dreaming of a) moving to Mexico to live on the beach and b) having time to knit. I had a trunk full of yarn waiting for me, begging to become elaborate sweaters, but when I sat down to knit one early February night, I discovered I had approximately no brain cells left. I was struggling to speak in complete sentences and not fall asleep in the middle of conversations, how the hell was I supposed to knit a sweater?
I rummaged through one of the large Mason jars in which I keep my needles and pulled out a crochet hook. Having learned to knit first, and taught myself to crochet out of a book in an evening, I admit I viewed the latter with a knitter’s snobbery. I was somewhat embarrassed to be seen at my knitting group working with a single hook while everyone else had shiny things in both hands. However, that dark winter’s night I had an awakening: crochet was fast and easy, and I had a lot of single skeins of yarn. I picked up a ball of bright orange Cascade 220 and made a simple double-crochet hat in the time it took to watch a movie.

From then on, I was unstoppable. I made a double-crochet hat every night. I gave a few away to the friends who wanted them, but I soon had a few just laying around. One very cold night I pinned a note to one of them: “Need a warm hat? Take this one.” I went downstairs, put it on top of a fire hydrant, and made a deli run. By the time I came back, the hat was gone. I averaged a hat a day, left on my street, each with the same note pinned to it. It was an excellent way to pass the last few stressful weeks in the City, before I gave up my apartment on March 1 and moved to Mexico to live on the beach.
Stacy Pershall’s first book, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl, will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2011.

Elsa Schiaparelli’s iconic Trompe L’oeil, “Bow Knot” knitted sweater, that started her career is now available for free download at School House Press.

Elsa Schiaparelli was the first fashion designer that I became interested in. I loved that she saw fashion AS art and not just clothing. Unlike works by her fellow artists and friends Dali, Magritte and Duchampe that were seen only in art houses, Schiaparelli’s surrealist art made it to the public because it WAS clothing. This blew my mind as to the possibilities of fashion, something i’d tried to avoid as an art student. For the first time for me, fashion was not a dirty word. Schiaparelli’s introduction of the Shoe Hat, or the Chest of Drawers suit (modeled after Dali’s antropomorphic chest of drawers paintings) worn at a high society gala, by a lady of leisure is amazing to me, and truly surreal. (taken from a paper I wrote while at the Surrey Institute of Art & design, UK 1998)

While working in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Costume Institute in the mid 90’s as more or less a high school drop out, I had the great luck and honor to work under the brilliant Curator Richard Martin. Martin accepted me and taught me more about art in fashion than anyone else could have. He brought respect back to the “red-headed step child” fashion department, tucked away in the basement of the museum, and wrote prolifically on the subject of fashion history. On discussing a vanity mirror suit by Schiaparelli, Martin once wrote:

“The paradoxical and discomforting aspect of the Schiaparelli gesture is that the mirrors reflected the vanity not only of the wearer but also of the spectator. As images of the wearer joined those from the external world, the affect achieved was like that of Surrealist photographic trompe l’oeil.” -Richard Martin, Fashion & Surrealism

Schiaparelli’s most famous pieces include the lobster dress where the white chiffon gown replaces a white china plate, atop which sits a lobster and garnish, and a pre-tattered trompe l’oeil gown and shawl. However, she got her start making one humble little sweater by hand and marketing it. It was The Bow Knot sweater, a surrealist, trompe l’oeil piece.

“Dress designing…It is to me, not a profession but an art. I found it was a most difficult and unsatisfying art, because as soon as the dress is born it has already become a thing of the past…A dress has no life of it’s own unless it is worn, and as soon as this happens, another personality takes over from you and animates it, or tries to, glorifies it or destroys it, or makes it into a song of beauty. More often it becomes an indifferent, or even a pitiful caricature of what you wanted it to be…A dream, an expression”

On March 20th, 2010 Booze & Yarn, along with artists working in every medium will be “planting” daffodils across this urban landscape, as a statement that grassroots organizing CAN make a difference. Last year the project was a great success, with artists across the country creating unique and beautiful flowers. Please join us!

Clara Bow has always been one of my favorites. No question she was beautiful, but she didn’t look quite like the other Hollywood girls. Always a bit rough around the edges, she was the not so squeaky clean, Brooklyn girl.

Born in the slums, to a schizophrenic mother and abusive father, Clara grew up playing in the streets with the boys, and working a hot dog stand on Coney Island as a teenager, that would later become Nathan’s Franks. She is quoted as saying she could cry on command by simply remembering horrific events of her childhood. Later, as an actress in Hollywood, the “Brooklyn Bonfire” came to embody the growing modern youth culture of the roaring 1920’s Flappers, in the same way James Dean would speak to disenfranchised Teenagers 20 years later. In a word, she had “IT”!

Sadly “the IT girl” couldn’t quite make it to the talkies. An overwhelming case of mic fright (some stories say it was her Brooklyn accent), worsened by a battle with schizophrenia of her own, she retired from Hollywood at age 26 and married Rex Bell. In and out of institutions, she never returned to hollywood, and never wrote her memoirs out of fear it would hurt her sons. Clara wore her troubles on her sleeve, and in her expressions, which made her an endearing and unforgettable actress, not JUST a pretty face.

Clara was famous for applying her red lipstick in the shape of a heart. This iconic fashion came to be known as putting on a “Clara Bow”. The good people at Rye House in NY may have had this in mind when creating a blood red drink in her honor. We can only hope the homemade grenadine will stain the drinker’s lips in a tipsy homage to the immortal “Brooklyn Bonfire”.

The Clara Bow

Ingredients:

3/4 ounces lemon juice

1/2 ounce grenadine

1/2 ounce St. Germain elderflower liqueur

1 1/2 ounces Bulleit Bourbon (i’m not paid by them i swear, it’s a coincidence it’s come up twice now)

Mint leaves

Procedure: Pour ingredients into a shaker over ice and shake with 5 or 6 mint leaves. Strain into a coupe glass and garnish with a mint leaf.